Nick Huzar
Appearances
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah, well, if you think about just your own, most people's buying and selling behavior, the good thing, and one of the reasons we started with goods is we all have a need to get things and get rid of things. Yeah, it is a pretty common thing. And so that in its own nature creates natural re-engagement, right? So maybe you're posting an item for sale, then you come back and you buy another item.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Like I wasn't looking for a painting, but I saw it, I was like, that's kind of cool. My wife hates it, but I like it. And so it kind of just works out that way sometimes. So people generally engage in OfferUp. The idea with it to be a very visual experience was to make it kind of like this treasure hunt. So people engage more on OfferUp, like social media, less like...
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
you know, kind of real just shopping. I have an intent. I'm in there to get my thing and I'm out. Like they just kind of browse. So pretty, pretty often. And so for us, I think the next leg for us is giving people even more reasons to come back. Like, man, I need services on my house or I need local jobs or, you know, I'm a small business owner. How do I drive more people into my establishment?
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
OfferUp's perfect for that because we have so much kind of local activity. So, That's a big part of looking at is like, what else can we do now that we have this big audience?
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Well, I think because they have so much engagement, it's worth trying these different verticals and seeing if our customers like it. And so, you know, I think we'll constantly be trying new things and seeing, you know, and seeing if people find it really valuable. But I think that's one of the advantages we have because we are a top of mind brand and people come back.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
So, I mean, you name it, we will play with it and we'll look at doing it. It doesn't mean that people are going to like it necessarily, but we should still try and do it.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
A lot of times building companies, they say it's about timing. I think we were pretty early. We saw this phone. We had this idea that, hey, we're all going to have these phones. We can just take pictures and we can communicate with these devices. But there's a lot of skepticism. A lot of people thinking, you name it, I've heard it. I've heard people say that no one's going to buy from their phone.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah. I mean, I think all companies need to keep growing. Like no one ever sits in stasis. If you sit in stasis too long, you're just slowly dying, in my opinion. And so that becomes hard as companies get bigger because they do become risk adverse. Things can slow down the machine. And so you sometimes need to just lean in and take calculated bets and see what's going to work.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
But sometimes it's not always intuitive. Like most people don't know, I think, AWS and Amazon. You know how that started? They had a bunch of extra computers. And then someone's like, well, what if we just put this on? What if we kind of use this? What are we going to do with all this? Right. So sometimes that's how good ideas come about.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
And you just need to have, I'd say, someone, you know, the executive team or the CEO say, hey, we're going to go try this. And the key is. You know, you don't always bet the farm, but in some cases you need to. Like Facebook is a good example. Mark Zuckerberg says we're going all in on mobile phones. And I think that was the right call because that created so much more engagement for Facebook.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
And so sometimes you need to make really big bets, like bet the company bets. And sometimes you could just buy these little experiments that you try. And if they don't work, oh, well, the business didn't die. But I think it's great to keep experimenting.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah. Well, that's another, the blockbuster example is another good one. Evil actually Netflix. So the original vision for Netflix was streaming, but they didn't, we didn't have the capacity to actually do it. So then they created, you know, the, I'm going to mail you the, uh, the DVD in the mail. Then, but then they disrupted themselves and said, no more DVDs.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
We're just going to go to streaming. So, I mean, those are risky. That's a, luckily they paid off. Do you remember that when Netflix tried to also create their other sub brand? What was that? What we call it? I forgot. That was a terrible failure. And luckily they, luckily they recovered from that, but that was, they knew right away that that was bad.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
How do you disrupt Craigslist? You know, no one's been able to do this. And so I think, you know, for better or worse, I think good entrepreneurs just have an idea and they can't get it out of their head. And that was definitely me. I was stubborn and I just said, that's it. We're going to go build this. But it was really tough in the early days trying to get scale, trying to get users to use it.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
God, we don't have enough time for all the failures. I think when it comes to failures, my biggest ones I would say is it's usually people related, like building, building companies is all about people, the founders, the investors, like the people you bring on the team. And it's, I think it's the hardest part for any entrepreneur. Like you have this idea, great.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Maybe you can code or build a product, but then you got to build a team. And that I think is the hardest part, um, not just hiring the one person, but how do you make sure that you're, you're helping them to work well together, um, building camaraderie or not moving fast enough on people that are just not right for the team. And so I've hired very toxic people that almost killed the company.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Like these are really hard things to navigate, especially when you're scaling very quickly. And so I, they think that I could go on and on with stories like that, that are, um, rough. I think on the flip side is actually the same part of the coin is hiring people that are like 10 X people. There are people that just, you're like, Whoa, like, look what just happened.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I don't even, I don't even have one-on-one meetings with you. It's like, I, you know what you're doing. We just check in every now and then that, wow, you're just crushing it. And so I think for me on both sides, it's all about usually the people more than anything, because the idea is easy. Everyone has the idea.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Like you can talk to probably a hundred people that said, Oh, I had the idea to do an offer up there. Okay, great.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
but why didn't you do it because you have to go do what i'm talking about you have to go build the people you have to go network you have to do all the hard steps so um i think those are the i think those are the hardest parts uh for sure good love it love it so uh last last question easier question for you now uh where do people find you and the brand if they want to learn more
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
yeah well people clearly gonna offer up uh offer up.com or they can find offer up in the app stores um people can find me on linkedin i'm on twitter um and so there's good ways to stay connected with me as well good love it nick thank you so much for the time today and diving into you know the brand and everything you've done how amazing it's grown and uh
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
So that was, I'd say, a two year journey of, hey, there's an app. Why isn't everybody using it? And so you just have to run a lot of experiments and understand what works, what doesn't work. But that was, you know, pretty much I'd sum up the first two years was just lots of failed experiments. And then ultimately some that worked and we just kept doubling down on those two to grow.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah, I'd say, you know, knowing your customers and knowing what matters. So in the world of a marketplace, when you post something, somebody better buy it. Because if somebody doesn't buy it, then what good is your marketplace? So we got really good in the beginning. I think sometimes people try to scale too big. In fact, there was a number of other competitors to offer up when we launched.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
They raised a lot more money than we did. And I told the team, don't worry, they're going to go out of business. Like, what are you talking about? I said, look, they're probably smart engineers, but they're not thinking about their number one metric. So they would launch and say San Francisco, then they'd say we're nationwide. Well, now it's peanut buttered the US.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
And if you're trying to convert and get people to use your local marketplace, who cares if your next install is in New York? Right. And so we did the opposite. In fact, we drew a circle on a map with like 30 miles around our office. And we said, if we don't win here, we don't there's no business here.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
And we spent a year just hammering on that circle, trying to figure out how do we get things to move. And so we would buy and sell things. Everything in here is from Opera, by the way. So my wife, 18, that's why it's in here. Oh, I love the idea. It's great. So you have to kind of fake it in early days. I'd show up and I'd buy the chair. I wouldn't say that I worked at OfferUp.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I would I would just pretend like I was a buyer. But then I hype it up, of course, like everyone uses it. I mean, well, no, I really did. So those are some of the benefit of doing as you're learning to you're talking to customers, you're getting some feedback. And so you do that a lot in the early days. Um, and that's important because that gets your, I call it the Petri dish phase, right?
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
You're figuring out the product or figure out and go to market. You're figuring out marketing. You're making sure that the metrics are working then. Okay. Now that works now show you can do that in other markets. And I think far too often I see entrepreneurs just throttling because they think they need a scale right away. And that's usually ends pretty badly. So we were very disciplined.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Like I said, we didn't end, we spent a year, one market before we went to any other markets.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I think Mark Adresin has said this, that great entrepreneurs can shape the world. And I believe in that. And it sounds kind of egotistical and maybe delusional too. But I think if you're getting after a problem space and you're doing something that's unique and you have the skills to go do it, you can make an impact. Yeah. Everyone said we couldn't compete with Craigslist. Everybody.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I get so many no's all the time. And look, half the country's installed OfferUp now. I think that shows just a relentless maybe ignorance and just like passion for something. But also I knew, I looked at the other products and I wasn't delusional. And I just felt like we could build a better product. I'm like, we could do it better. And so I think...
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
There's kind of a balance of that that you have to strike. And I think a relentlessness when you're building the company. People are too impatient, especially in this day and age. We're all in the TikTok swiping mode. And to build companies, it scales really hard. And it takes a long time. And I think most people just give up.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
There was plenty of days to give up in the early days that we were doing it.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah. So we, again, going back to that circle idea, like, okay, what is the metric you're trying to move? And so we tried every experiment you could imagine. Like we even rented a long haul moving truck and put a thousand helium balloons in there with off-road branding. And we went to the densest neighborhood we can find and we just blanketed it with off-road branding. It looks cool.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
So imagine coming to a neighborhood everywhere you looked. And my theory was like, it was the idea was, hey, we're going to, it's like lighting the, lighting a brush fire. Like, hey, we can get everyone to buy and sell and maybe that's the spark and that kind of expands. that was a big waste of time. Didn't really do a whole lot, but it gives you an idea of the type of experiments that we ran.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah, OfferUp's the largest local marketplace in the United States, and we really want to be the best at buying and selling things locally. Not just buying and selling. Actually, we're branching out big time this year. We're launching services and jobs and rentals, and we even have local news now. So we really want to be everything local is kind of how I would think about OfferUp.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
So, you know, we ran everything, we measured everything. And ultimately we tried things like Google and Facebook that yielded pretty good results. And we kept doubling down on that and, you know, kind of repeated that playbook throughout the country to the point when you get enough scale, you don't have to really market as much locally. You could just do it, you know, nationally, but,
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
And so over the years, we started to spend more time doing that. I mean, you name it, we've done TV, radio. I don't know if we've ever done a billboard, but we've tried a lot of experiments. So I think in the early days, it's about thinking about as many ideas as you can and how fast can you test and work. to see what, which one of those moves the needle. We didn't, we didn't know, honestly.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Well, we got lucky because... We were in the beta for Facebook mobile ads. So at the time, Facebook used to have these ads and I'm dating myself. It's way back before that mobile app. I don't know how many of your listeners even remember that world. But they had these ads that were in the bottom right gutter and they were small and they didn't convert very well.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
But then my co-founder said, hey, there's this beta for mobile ads. You want to try it? And this is when we had like no money. I said, sure, maybe like 50 bucks. But keep in mind, we were geo-targeting kind of like around our office and it was working. It was pretty effective. We could really target the type of audience that we wanted. So we were pretty fortunate being in the beta that it wasn't
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
available to everybody. So pretty quickly we dominated Seattle. We got a lot of coverage in Seattle and that kind of helped to kind of us to understand kind of market dynamics and how we could target locally. But I I'd say probably without, without a smartphone or without Facebook, there probably would be no offer up. Wow, crazy.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Yeah. Mostly. Sometimes there's nuances, like a black leather couch might be really well in Seattle, but not in Arizona. Nobody wants that hot black leather couch in Arizona. So I think there's nuances like that. But in general, I think where we became, I would say, world class is... local marketing.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I would say the OfferUp team, when it comes to understanding local market dynamics, buying and selling behaviors, how far people are willing to drive to get things, I think we're best in class with that because we've been doing it for a decade.
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
actually more about the products so um you know offer up sales billions of dollars of furniture every year right so like like clearly couches and things like that do very well because we all need them and they're very much a local product so uh we really tried to showcase all the the great things that were on the marketplace that had to yield the best results for us
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
exactly and you see certain items i remember the first time i saw a car or first time i saw a boat and then right after that within a few weeks you saw way more boats oh wow you know you name it i've seen it how did you feel going from like you know cheap items couches and then it's like now you start seeing ten thousand dollars right like that's great yeah
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Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
seeing jets lamborghinis like you name it it's it's cool to just see how far it will go like i have my my house here that when i moved in here it was all like a jungle and i want to do a bunch of
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
landscaping out front and i was tired of doing this and i think i was complaining the next day in front of a vendor well the vendor happened to be an offer up user he goes you should just post it for free and offer up and somebody will rip out all your plants for you again no way sure enough get it my whole front of my yard was empty in two days well what would what was the coolest the item where you like text your team and friends like wow look what just got posted did you ever have one where it was like super cool
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
I don't know, there's so much. So our office was always furnished from offer up, like the whole thing, like down to the other than I'd say the laptops, every single thing in the office was from offer up. So there's been so many neat things. Like we have a Star Wars room. It's one of my favorite rooms. It has all these life-size Star Wars characters. Yeah.
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Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
uh you know we have this our boardroom table it took about 18 guys to get it in because it is massive it's just this huge table that we found on there uh we have we have another dining table that was actually a bowling lane okay it was all up over the years and somebody um kind of put these big you know steel frames on it and made it a cool table so it's just it's kind of a cool showpiece when people come by the office because there's so many different things there
Living The Red Life
Nick Huzar on Innovation, Failure & the Treasure Hunt That Became OfferUp
Can you talk about that growth journey? Sure. Well, I, I'd say in the early days, you know, everyone has the idea. Uh, and then it's, then the hard part is how you execute, how do you build it? Um, you know, we started writing code for offer up before there were Android phones. That gives you an idea of where we were. Um, And it was a hard time.